Biological effect of food additive titanium dioxide nanoparticles on intestine: an in vitro study

Titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO₂ NPs) are widely found in food‐related consumer products. Understanding the effect of TiO₂ NPs on the intestinal barrier and absorption is essential and vital for the safety assessment of orally administrated TiO₂ NPs. In this study, the cytotoxicity and translocation of two native TiO₂ NPs, and these two TiO₂ NPs pretreated with the digestion simulation fluid or bovine serum albumin were investigated in undifferentiated Caco‐2 cells, differentiated Caco‐2 cells and Caco‐2 monolayer. TiO₂ NPs with a concentration less than 200 µg ml^–1 did not induce any toxicity in differentiated cells and Caco‐2 monolayer after 24 h exposure. However, TiO₂ NPs pretreated with digestion simulation fluids at 200 µg ml^–1 inhibited the growth of undifferentiated Caco‐2 cells. Undifferentiated Caco‐2 cells swallowed native TiO₂ NPs easily, but not pretreated NPs, implying the protein coating on NPs impeded the cellular uptake. Compared with undifferentiated cells, differentiated ones possessed much lower uptake ability of these TiO₂ NPs. Similarly, the traverse of TiO₂ NPs through the Caco‐2 monolayer was also negligible. Therefore, we infer the possibility of TiO₂ NPs traversing through the intestine of animal or human after oral intake is quite low. This study provides valuable information for the risk assessment of TiO₂ NPs in food. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paeonol ameliorates CFA-induced inflammatory pain by inhibiting HMGB1/TLR4/NF-κB p65 pathway

Metabolic Brain Disease - The enhanced release of inflammatory cytokines mediated by high mobility group box1 (HMGB1) leads to pain sensation, and has been implicated in the etiology of...     

Lower risk of primary Sjogren’s syndrome in patients with dengue virus infection: a nationwide cohort study in Taiwan

Clinical Rheumatology - The data concerning the association between dengue viruses (DV) infection and autoimmune diseases (ADs) remain unclear and are scarce. This nationwide population-based...     

Liver injury in COVID-19: A minireview

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by infection with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), has escalated into a global tragedy afflicting human health, life, and social governance. Through the increasing depth of research and a better understanding of this disease, it has been ascertained that, in addition to the lungs, SARS-CoV-2 can also induce injuries to other organs including the liver. Liver injury is a common clinical manifestation of COVID-19, particularly in severe cases, and is often associated with a poorer prognosis and higher severity of COVID-19. This review focuses on the general existing information on liver injury caused by COVID-19, including risk factors and subpopulations of liver injury in COVID-19, the association between preexisting liver diseases and the severity of COVID-19, and the potential mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 affects the liver. This review may provide some useful information for the development of therapeutic and preventive strategies for COVID-19-associated liver injury.     

Human identification performed with skull’s sphenoid sinus based on deep learning

Human identification plays a significant role in the investigations of disasters and criminal cases. Human identification could be achieved quickly and efficiently via 3D sphenoid sinus models by customized convolutional neural networks. In this retrospective study, a deep learning neural network was proposed to achieve human identification of 1475 noncontrast thin-slice CT scans. A total of 732 patients were retrieved and studied (82% for model training and 18% for testing). By establishing an individual recognition framework, the anonymous sphenoid sinus model was matched and cross-tested, and the performance of the framework also was evaluated on the test set using the recognition rate, ROC curve and identification speed. Finally, manual matching was performed based on the framework results in the test set. Out of a total of 732 subjects (mean age 46.45 years ± 14.92 (SD); 349 women), 600 subjects were trained, and 132 subjects were tested. The present automatic human identification has achieved Rank 1 and Rank 5 accuracy values of 93.94% and 99.24%, respectively, in the test set. In addition, all the identifications were completed within 55 s, which manifested the inference speed of the test set. We used the comparison results of the MVSS-Net to exclude sphenoid sinus models with low similarity and carried out traditional visual comparisons of the CT anatomical aspects of the sphenoid sinus of 132 individuals with an accuracy of 100%. The customized deep learning framework achieves reliable and fast human identification based on a 3D sphenoid sinus and can assist forensic radiologists in human identification accuracy.

     

Development and validation of a novel 133-plex forensic STR panel (52 STRs and 81 Y-STRs) using single-end 400 bp massive parallel sequencing

International Journal of Legal Medicine - Short tandem repeats (STRs) are the preferred genetic markers in forensic DNA analysis, routinely measured by capillary electrophoresis (CE) method based...     

Chromic-P32 phosphate treatment of implanted pancreatic carcinoma： Mechanism involved

AIM: To study the effects of chromic-P32 phosphate (32P colloids) interstitial administration in Pc-3 implanted pancreatic carcinoma, and investigate its anticancer mechanism. METHODS: Ninety-eight tumor bearing nude mice were killed at different time points after the injection of 32P colloids to the tumor core with observed radioactivity. The light microscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and immuno-histochemistry and flow cytometry were used to study the rates of tumor cell necrosis, proliferating cell nuclear antigen index, the micro vessel density (MVD). The changes of the biological response to the lymphatic transported 32P colloids in the inguinal lymph node (ILN) were dynamically observed, and the percentage of tumor cell apoptosis, and Apo2.7, caspase-3, Bcl-2, Bax-related gene expression were observed too. RESULTS: The half-life of effective medication is 13 d after injection of 32P colloids to the tumor stroma, in 1-6 groups, the tumor cell necrosis rates were 20%, 45%, 65%, 70%, 95% and 4%, respectively (F= 4.14-105.36, P<0.01). MVD were 38.5±4.0,28.0±2.9,17.0±2.9,8.8±1.5, 5.7±2.3 and 65.0±5.2 (t=11.9-26.1,P<0.01),respectively. Under TEM fairly differentiated Pc-3 cells were found. Thirty days after medication, tumors were shrunk and dried with scabs detached, and those in control group increased in size prominently with plenty of hypodermic blood vessels. In all animals the ILN were enlarged but in medicated animals they appeared later and smaller than those in control group.The extent of irradiative injury in ILN was positively correlated to the dosage of medication. Typical tumor cell apoptosis could be found under TEM in animals with intra-tumoral injection of low dosed 32P colloids. The peak of apoptosis occurred in 2.96 MBq group and 24 h after irradiation. In the course of irradiation induced apoptosis,the value of Bcl-2/Bax was down regulated; Apo2.7 and caspase-3 protein expression were prominently increased dose dependently. CONCLUSION: 32P colloids intra-tumor injection having prominent anticancer effectiveness may reveal the ability of promoting cell differentiation. The low dose 32P colloids may induce human pancreatic carcinoma Pc-3 implanted tumor cell apoptosis; Apo2.7, caspase-3, Bcl-2 and Bax protein participated in regulating the process of irradiation induced cell apoptosis.